6) Payment & Pricing

Your earnings will be sent to your bank account on the 4th of each month. It may take anywhere between 1 and 4 days (excluding weekends) for the payment to reach you (this depends on the banks). The payment will cover all the lessons you gave during the previous month.

Setting Your Rate

When you created an account, you were asked to set your 55-minute lesson rate. This can be updated at any point via My Profile Settings.

Changes only affect people considering booking with you - if you want to adjust your rate for an existing student, you'll need to do this under Students > Student Details.

The rate applies to single lesson purchases. To encourage students to take more lessons with you, if a student buys 5 lessons the price per lesson will be 4% lower, if they buy 10 lessons it will be 8% lower, and for 20 lessons it will be 12% lower.

You do not need to consider LanguaTalk commission as this will be added afterwards. This differs to other sites, so if you also work via one that takes commission off your rate, add a lower rate on LanguaTalk so that your lessons cost roughly the same.

A common strategy is to start at a slightly discounted rate and increase it little by little as you build your reputation through receiving positive reviews. The lowest rates tutors are permitted to set are as follows (in USD):

German & Swedish: $13

French, Dutch & Japanese: $11

All other languages: $8

As mentioned above, you can update the rate an existing student has under Student Details. We recommend limiting any changes to 1 to 2 USD as larger rises can lead to the student quitting or changing tutor (and retaining students is key to your success).

If in Settings, you choose to also offer 30-minute lessons, these will cost 68% of your 55-minute lessons.

Regarding 30-minute trial sessions, tutors who offer them for free to students who are new to LanguaTalk tend to get more bookings, however you can opt to charge 30% of your standard 55-minute lesson price if you select this option in your Settings.

Commission & Payment Fees

One reason we started LanguaTalk is to help tutors earn a living and not have to rely on websites that charge extremely high commission rates. Our commission is capped at 16% of the total price of each lesson. Our aim is to be able to reduce this to 15% or lower once we become less dependent on advertising.

Advertising is expensive; when someone clicks on our website from Google, we pay up to $5 per click. The commission also goes towards running and improving our technology, marketing, and providing support to students and tutors.

We send your earnings directly to your local bank account. This may be cheaper than methods other sites use like PayPal and Payoneer, which both have a lot of hidden fees.

When you receive a payment, 1.5% of the total amount sent will be deducted for fees associated with sending international payments. These fees come from Stripe and the banks involved. If your bank account is not in the US, the banks will also charge a 1% currency conversion fee.

Here is an example for tutors who are not based in the US: if your balance is $200, you should receive the equivalent of $195 in your currency ($5 is paid in fees). The exchange rate will be calculated on the day the payment is initiated.

Next up: everything you need to know about trial sessions.